After the Magisters went I started missing them. Much irrational thought later I decided that I needed some Dovedales. It may be some left over residual memory of some super 8s I had when I was young, they were very nice despite the lack of tweeter (retrospective young thought). The big Dovedale woofers look similar with the green felt, bit nervous of those strange pink domes though... Anyway, eventually "won" some with mint drivers slightly tatty boxes. Long story short the rubber had got stiff, but not yet brittle.

Sulk, got the Magnums... (must have bass now). After much research and thought, the Dovedales don't seem to be a standard size for foam, and I had got to the point of contemplating cutting away some of the cone to fit a flat foam. I was tidying up the garden when I found a 700 inner tube I had changed recently.
At this point I thought what have I got to loose, so gave it a good wash, (lots of washing up liquid applied neat), chopped out the valve...

To try to recreate the Magister experience I hooked up the Magnums to the little ECL86 amp mentioned previously. I was greeted again with enormous deep bass, but not as happy over all, a rather lumpy frequency response, and a big question, what's going on... So I hooked up my Hybrid amp and the Magnums sounded a bit more normal, but the bass was considerably reigned in, disappointingly.

I think the Magnums like being back against the wall, they seem happy there and the in room response is now quite civilised with a nice boom free sound and bass is only there when it should be.

Still confused, had the ECL86 on the bench to measure to try and find out what's up. The frequency response looks a bit rolled off to the bottom, so no help there, but the treble peak is looking quite promising, explaining the "prominent" treble. After some wriggling the little amp surrendered its output impedance, all be it with significant 50Hz artefacts.